


Too Naïve, Too Pretty, Too Weak

by cyndisision



Series: Too Steve [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Bucky and Steve are pretty much poly, Canon Temporary Character Death, F/M, Internalized Misogyny, Internalized Transphobia, M/M, Multi, The super-soldier procedure has unexpected side-effects, Trans male privilege, World War II era Captain America, trans!Steve
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-03
Updated: 2014-09-03
Packaged: 2018-02-16 01:04:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,518
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2250072
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cyndisision/pseuds/cyndisision
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Steve’s heart drops into the pit of his stomach. He’s been so desperate to see Bucky again that he forgot about this part, about Bucky seeing him. Will he recognize Steve as the person he’s known his whole life? And when he does, what then?  </i>
</p><p>  <i>It’s one thing playing dress-up in Bucky’s clothes; it’s another to be standing here, broad, tall, and muscular, helping Bucky to his feet.</i></p><p> </p><p>A prequel to "Too Shy, Too Scared, Too Busy," showing how a female-assigned Steve adjusts to his new body when the super-soldier serum transforms him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Too Naïve, Too Pretty, Too Weak

**Author's Note:**

> If you're nervous about the "Internalized transphobia," "Internalized misogyny," and "Trans male privilege" tags, please see the end notes for a more detailed summary to help you decide if you want to read the story.
> 
> Thanks to Frances Stewart for the beta, and the cluefulness check.

Stephanie touches her tongue gingerly to the tip of each tooth, checking to see if any came loose. Her mouth is full enough of blood that she can't tell for sure.

"What the hell was that, Rogers?" says Bucky as he dabs the rag to her face, trying to brush out some of the grit embedded in her cheek. He's trying to sound stern, but she can hear the undercurrent: a combination of amusement, resignation, and respect for her stubbornness.

"Bullies," she says, but she's trying to move her mouth as little as possible, so it comes out more like _Nullies_. "I hate 'en."

"Yeah, well, thing about bullies is they don't follow the rule that says not to hit a girl."

She twists the less messed-up side of her face. "Good. Stutid lule."

Bucky shakes his head. "Sometimes I think you like getting punched."

Stephanie can't form the words right now to start up the usual argument, but she rolls her eyes to make sure he knows she's thinking them.

He smiles. “Punk,” he says, and puts his arm around her.

“Jerk,” she replies through the blood.

Bucky leans down to give her a kiss, and then, suddenly remembering that her face is all messed up, changes course at the last second and plants it on the tip of her nose instead.

She leans into him, sitting there on the step cradling a bloody rag in her lap, smiling with her eyes if not her mouth.

~*~

The clerk at the recruiting desk greets each man in line with a brisk, efficient nod as he hands them a blank form or receives their completed one. When Stephanie reaches the front of the line, his expression changes, softens.

"Morning, miss," he says, turning away to look through the piles of stuff behind his desk. He flicks through a stack of folders, checks under a cup of coffee, and opens and closes every drawer. Finally he gets up to look through some files on a shelf behind him.

Behind her, feet shuffle on the dirty gray linoleum.

"What's the hold-up?" says someone.

"Rosie the Riveter here," comes the reply.

Stephanie feels the heat flood her face, daren't turn around. She keeps her eyes fixed forward, hoping her hair isn't pulled back severely enough that they can see the blush reddening her ears.

She tries to tune out the grumbling behind her, picks up the word "nurse" a few times.

"Here ya go, miss," says the recruiting clerk, his tone less friendly than when he greeted her. He slides papers across the desk toward her: a brochure and application form for the Women's Army Corps, and turns his attention to the man behind her. "Next?"

Stephanie puts her hand on the paperwork, but doesn't move away. "But what if—" she breaks off, clears her throat, tries again. "What if I want to join a specific unit? Like, say, the 107th?"

The clerk looks at her like he can't decide if she's kidding or crazy. "Fill out the form, don't fill out the form. It's no skin offa my nose." He looks away. "Next!"

She picks up the paperwork and walks back past the line toward the door, enduring a gauntlet of self-conscious nods accompanied by "Miss," and the occasional leer or scathing "Rosie."

 _Can't just be another guy applying for the Army_ , she thinks to herself. _Gotta be a whole song-and-dance routine._

~*~

"Do me a favor," she begs of a clerk at another office.

"I am doing you a favor; I'm saving your life." And then, seeing Stephanie hesitate, "Don't be naïve. You won't last five minutes out there."

"How am I more naïve than them?" she asks, glancing around the recruiting room where dozens of young men sit waiting.

She never gets an answer.

~*~

Stephanie looks around the bar, feeling conspicuous in her WAC uniform. The shirt is starchy and tight, the hat perches awkwardly, and the shoes pinch her toes.

She smiles politely and shakes hands with the two men, new acquaintances of Bucky's from basic training. They say their names, but she doesn't commit them to memory. Her turn to tell them a name—the name she hates. She makes a decision on impulse.

"Rogers," she says, last name first, just like they did. "Steve Rogers."

The taller one smirks. "Pleasure to meet you, Stevie."

Her stomach clenches up. "Don't call me that," she mutters.

The tall, smirking fella is talking again. "You're too pretty to be wearing that, Stevie," he says, looking her up and down. "Get your fella here to fix you up with some nice stockings."

Bucky just claps a hand on her shoulder. "Glad you made it out tonight, Steve," he says, and she studies his face for a hint of mockery, but there isn't any.

~*~

She hears the key in the door—Bucky, using the spare she keeps under the brick—and scrambles to cover her chest with the shirt. It's about three paces in this tiny apartment from the front door to her bedroom, so there's no time to finish getting dressed before Bucky appears in the doorway.

"Um, hi," she says, smiling weakly.

A confused smile flickers across his face. "Is that my shirt?"

"Um." She keeps holding the shirt in front of her like a shield.

"Suddenly developed a case of modesty?" he says, stepping across the room toward her slowly, with that look of intent in his eyes—she loves that look. "’Cos I was hoping..." And then he's there, slipping his hands around her bare waist, trapping her arms—still holding his shirt—between them. He bends his head toward her, but she doesn't immediately crane up to meet him.

"Oh yeah?" she teases. "What were you hoping?"

In reply, he bends lower, brushing his lips gently across hers. She feels his hands, rough with calluses, sliding up her back, and she shivers, pressing up toward him.

And then his hands feel the thing she'd been trying to hide—the thing he'd momentarily distracted her from.

He pulls back. "Steve?" He's been calling her that ever since the other night at the bar, but she can't revel in it right now. "Are you hurt?"

She lets him pull her arms down, away from her body, revealing the bandage she's got wrapped around her chest, compressing her breasts until they almost—almost—look like just pecs. She shakes her head. "No, I'm fine."

"You don't seem fine. What's going on?"

"They're going to send you away from me, Bucky," she whispers, afraid to raise her voice any higher in case it breaks. "Any day now, they're going to send you away, and you'll be out there on the front fighting, and I'll be back here on my own..."

"Tomorrow," he says, and he won’t look her in the eye.

"What?"

"I got my orders. I'm shipping out tomorrow."

"Oh God, Bucky..." she tries to throw her arms around him, but they're all tangled up in the shirt still, and end up crushed between the two of them as she buries her head in his chest.

He laughs at her, but it comes thickly, like he's trying not to cry. "So what is this, some kind of Iponine thing?"

"Eponine," she corrects, surprised that he even remembered that from back in the days when she used to relate to him the plot of every book she read. "Yeah, I guess it kind of is." A woman who got dressed up as a man to go to war? Close enough.

"Didn't Eponine die?"

"They all died," she says, then realizes it’s probably not the time to get flippant. "Look, I know it's a risk. I don't care."

Bucky's eyes go wide with horror. He looks like he's going to throw up—or maybe throw something.

"No, I don't mean that. I mean, you could die, and you're going to the front anyway. I just want that same opportunity."

"You don't have to prove yourself to me, Steve. Only reason they won’t send you is because they think Fritz should stand a fighting chance."

"It's not about proving myself—it's about being the person on the outside that I am in my head." She takes a breath, shakes her head to clear it. "Look, let's not argue. It's your last night. Are we going out? I need to find a dress..."

He stops her with a gentle hand on her arm. "Let's see you, first." He nods toward the shirt that's she's somehow still holding. He helps her to pull it on, watches as she watches herself in the mirror, her deft fingers buttoning it up. She looks good, if she does say so herself: hair slicked back, her chest smooth and flat under the masculine-cut shirt. She squares her shoulders and risks a glance at Bucky.

Their eyes meet in the mirror, and suddenly the air in the room is heavy, full of static, like the sky before a thunderstorm. Steve hears Bucky's rough breathing in the silence. The look of intent is back in his eyes, and they move toward each other at the same time, and perhaps it's because they know this is their last night, but there's a desperation and urgency in the kiss that's never been there before.

Afterwards, it's Bucky's idea that Steve go out dressed that way. “After all,” he says, “You’re still wearing some of it.”

He's gotten hold of two tickets to the Expo. It’s big, and flashy, and that industrialist guy, Howard Stark, gets up on the stage making all sorts of promises about the future.

 _Not my future_ , Steve thinks.

Bucky’s up to mischief. He’s making his way over to where Steve’s standing, a girl on each arm. He introduces his best friend as a fella, giving Steve a wink behind their backs. Sure, why not? They can play-act as a couple of regular guys, out for one last good time before deployment. It’s half right.

 _Some double date this is_ , Steve thinks ten minutes later. She makes for a pretty short, weedy man, and hardly dares speak in case her voice gives her away. She hangs back as the girls laugh, asking Bucky to take them dancing.

Normally she wouldn’t mind if he does—whether or not it’s only dancing. There have been other women, but she knows he’ll always come back to her. She’s free to do the same, though only once did she take it further than just kissing. But tonight is his last night, and jealousy stabs through her at the thought he might not spend it with her. She looks around for something to distract her.

Then she sees the advertisement: ENLIST NOW!, it says, rows of saluting soldiers lined up with determined faces, except the front one—the biggest, strongest soldier of all—who has a mirror where his face should be. Steve steps up onto the little platform. She’s too short to get her face to line up in the mirror under the helmet, but as she strains up on tip-toes, squinting, she can almost see herself with broad shoulders, with strong arms, like the soldier in the picture.

“C’mon, you’re kind of missing the point of a double date,” says Bucky behind her, still with the glint of mischief. Then he notices the sign they’re standing under, the one for the recruiting center, and turns serious. “You really gonna do this?”

“It’s a fair—I’m gonna try my luck.”

“They’ll catch you. There’s a physical, you know. Look, why’re you so keen to fight? There’s so many important jobs.”

“What am I gonna do, route telephone calls—”

“Yes!”

“—and do the typing?”

“Why not?”

“Bucky, come on, there are men laying down their lives. I’ve got no right to do any less than that. That’s what you don’t understand—this isn’t about me.”

“Right,” says Bucky, and Steve sees his face soften, backing down so they won't spend their last evening fighting. They hug, and call each other a “punk” and a “jerk,” and Steve regrets wearing these clothes now—she wants to kiss and make up, wants to be on Bucky’s arm as they parade around the Expo.

But she did wear these clothes, and so Steve goes to the recruiting center…unaware of the small, bespectacled man who watched the entire exchange.

Fortunately for Steve, she doesn’t get as far as the physical exam before the Military Police are shepherding the bespectacled man into her curtained-off room.

“Dr. Abraham Erskine,” says the stranger, shaking Steve’s hand, and taking out a file—Steve’s file.

“Steve Rogers,” she replies, pitching her voice down

“Very well, Steve,” says Erskine. “Do you want to go overseas? Kill some Nazis?”

And something is very strange here, because Steve can see, as Erskine flips through the pages, that it’s all there—her real file, including her recruitment paperwork for the WAC. But Erskine doesn’t have her arrested, doesn’t even call her by the name in her file.

Instead, after a short interview, he offers Steve a chance—only a chance—in a special division called the Strategic Scientific Reserve.

“Congratulations,” he says, handing Steve back her file, “soldier.”

~*~

Agent Carter gravitates toward her from the start. Which is convenient, because if Peggy didn’t do the gravitating then Steve would’ve. Thing is, it’s not the same quality of gravity.

Peggy shares conspiratorial eye-rolls with Steve whenever a man on the base talks down to her—right before laying him out with a vicious right hook. She’s behind Col. Phillips, her face studiously blank, when he gets up there quoting Patton about how “…wars are fought with weapons but they are won by men.”

“We are going to win this war,” says Phillips, pacing the line of recruits, “because we have the best…”

He stops, just for a moment, as he passes Steve.

“…men.”

The women's barracks is small, housing Steve, Agent Carter, some WAC recruits, and a couple of typists. Peggy tracks her down in there, full of a story about some Sergeant who seemed to think she'd sew a button on for him. She's taking stuff out of her pack, slamming each item down onto her bunk with enough force that Steve thinks the flimsy frame is going to give way.

"...you know how it is," she finishes.

"Yeah," says Steve. "It sure would be nice to be a fella."

Peggy snorts. "Nice? Steve, if we were all men, who would get the real work done?"

"No, yeah, you're right." Steve's flustered. She thought this was what Peggy was getting at, but she's gone and said the wrong thing. For some reason it matters a great deal that she say the right thing to Peggy. "I was just thinking life would be easier, that's all."

"Well, yes," Peggy relents. "I do hate being treated 'like a woman'."

Steve feels like a traitor. Peggy wants a world where women can do the things men can do. If Steve could click her fingers and become a man, well, they'd still be no closer to that world than they are now.

Peggy starts stripping down, changing into a fresh uniform, and Steve looks away, a faint blush creeping up her cheeks. _What the hell is wrong with me?_

She picks up the book she keeps by her bunk and shakes the photograph out of it—the picture of her and Bucky, smiling in front of a cheesy backdrop painted to look like a pier. They had it taken at Coney Island last year, and Steve spent every penny in her pocket to get two copies. She wonders whether Bucky still has his, whether he takes it out each night to look at it, before tucking it back into one of the letters she wrote him. She wonders what the stars look like where he is, whether he's getting enough to eat, whether he's cold, or afraid.

And she's back here in the States, wishing she could step into a machine and come out as a man, wishing that some dame would look at her. She feels doubly the traitor.

She tucks the photo back into the book and opens up her footlocker, laying it on top of the shirt, Bucky's shirt, the one she wore the night before he shipped out. Her fingers trail over the fabric, soft with age and wear, and she snaps the footlocker shut.

"Agent Carter," she says, and runs her tongue over her left canine, chipped years ago in a fight she knew she'd never win. "I wonder if you might teach me that smart right hook of yours. I can think of a few bullies who need taking down a peg."

~*~

Howard Stark will tell her, months later, that the reason she's selected for Project Rebirth is because the higher-ups think she's expendable, an ideal guinea pig for the procedure. Col. Phillips protests that she's too weak, won't even survive the procedure, but he's overruled. Howard will tell her this with a buddy-buddy smirk that says, "And now the joke's on them." But it stings.

At the time, though, all she can think is that it's because she's proven herself—if not the worthiest, then at least the most committed. She's thrown herself on a grenade (no matter that it was a fake), she's done all the same training exercises as the men, and sometimes she didn't even come in last. She's never quite mastered Agent Carter's right hook, but she's worked the hardest; she deserves this.

And though the procedure gives her an eidetic memory, she'll never quite be able to remember what happened in that chamber. There's the shot—just penicillin—then there's the pod closing, the sudden panic that the last thing she'll see is the sterile SSR lab smeared through the thick glass, and the agony.

They'll say she screamed, they'll say she wouldn't let them stop, but those tales will sound like something that happened to someone else. The change itself, that's a blur.

~*~

Steve steps out of the pod to a wave of murmuring that rolls around the room.

"I did it." Steve staggers a little, leans on the scientists.

"You did it," says Dr. Erskine, and there's something off in his tone, but that doesn't register right away.

"How do you feel?" says Peggy, and why is she looking at Steve like that?

"Taller."

"You look... taller."

She lifts one hand toward Steve, as if involuntarily, but gets a hold of herself and pulls it away. And maybe this is the afterlife, because suddenly she's got that look in her eye, the one Steve suspects she sees frequently on Steve's face. The one of suppressed longing, mingled with guilt.

"What—?" says Steve, and finally looks down.

"Perhaps you should—" begins Dr. Erskine, and Steve never knows what he was going to say. Should brace yourself, maybe? Should sit down?

But no amount of bracing could prepare Steve for this: the broad shoulders, the strong arms, the rippling muscles. And the narrow hips and smooth chest that proclaim Steve, unmistakably, a man.

Steve lifts one hand in wonder, and finds a square jaw, even a hint of stubble as if from a beard shaved hours ago.

Steve's heart skips, his stomach turns over, and a babble breaks out in the lab.

"—must be a terrible shock," Dr. Erskine is saying.

And yes, it's true, there is shock; but under the shock there's a rising elation, and relief.

~*~

It takes him far longer to get used to being ten inches taller and a hundred pounds heavier, to learn where his arms and legs end, and how not to hit his head on low lampshades, than it does to start thinking of himself as a man.

Steve wants to go after the man behind Dr. Erskine's assassination. But Col. Phillips tells him, "You're an experiment. A freak."

Howard Stark wants to fix it—Steve’s only reason to be glad the program's been shut down.

Peggy never looks at him, except when he catches her _looking_ at him.

They only keep him around for a few days, deciding what to do with him, before sending him on tour with the USO.

~*~

"You're a true gent," says one of the chorus girls—Rita. She's tipsy on cheap gin, flopped backstage in Steve's dressing room on a chaise lounge that looks like it hasn't been cleaned since the '20s.

This time Steve gets a dressing room to himself, with an actual door that closes. He misses the camaraderie of the communal room with the chorus girls' chatter.

Fred Lasky, the guy who plays Hitler, grumbles his envy. "It's nonstop lipstick and giggling in here."

Steve frowns; he'd love the company. Sure, most of the girls act coy around him, but he can sometimes get them to open up about their brothers or their sweethearts who have gone away to the front. He tells them about his best friend Bucky, but aches at not being able to confide what Bucky means to him. His secrets hang like a lead curtain between him and his team.

Now Rita is in his dressing room, all lipstick and tipsy giggles, telling him he's a true gent.

"How do you mean?"

"Oh, those other fellas, they think it's all holding doors and buying you drinks. I got my own drinks, thankyouverymuch!" She holds up a bottle to demonstrate; there's some liquid still left in it to slosh about in the bottom. "They don't care what you talk about." She pushes herself to her feet and sways—a little unsteadily—over to Steve in her stockinged feet. "You're not like that."

She's close enough to reach out and touch, if he wants to. And he wants to.

Suddenly she's in his lap, sitting astride him, and his hands are on her waist. She's still wearing her stage costume, the ridiculous hat perched askew.

"I promised myself I'd never be that kind of man," he says. He's not sure whether he means the kind who doesn't listen to what girls say, or the kind that takes advantage. Maybe they're the same kind.

Rita has her hands on his shoulders, and now she runs them down over his chest, leaning forward so her lips are a hair's breadth from his.

"Rita," he says, trying to get up the resolve to push her away. "Won't you regret this in the morning?"

She whispers her reply against his mouth, barely louder than a breath. "I been thinking about this for weeks."

Afterwards, he collapses next to her on the chaise. It takes them both a few minutes to get their breath back.

"See?" she says at last. "A true gent."

~*~

Rita isn't on the tour that takes him to Italy. It's lonelier than ever—dirty, gray, miserable, and he feels sick with guilt that he's up here prancing instead of down there fighting. When the soldiers boo him off stage, he knows they’re right.

Then he finds out Bucky is M.I.A.

“If you know where they are,” he pleads with Col. Phillips, “why not at least…”

Phillips says he wouldn’t understand, that he’s just a “chorus girl,” and Steve has to glance around to see if any of the other soldiers have overheard.

~*~

Steve finds Bucky strapped to an operating table in some sick lab on the HYDRA base. His eyes are glassy and his skin slick with sweat.

“Sergeant… 32557… Barnes…” he’s mumbling, over and over.

Steve fumbles at the restraints in his haste to get them undone. “Bucky, oh my god,” he whispers.

Bucky looks up blankly, looks through Steve as if not seeing him at all.

“It’s me. It’s Steve.”

“Steve?” Bucky’s eyes come into focus, but there’s still no recognition in his face. His voice is thick, like he’s been drugged.

Steve’s heart drops into the pit of his stomach. He’s been so desperate to see Bucky again that he forgot about this part, about Bucky seeing him. Will he recognize Steve as the person he’s known his whole life? And when he does, what then?

It’s one thing playing dress-up in Bucky’s clothes; it’s another to be standing here, broad, tall, and muscular, helping Bucky to his feet. He’s suddenly hyper-aware of this stupid uniform, this costume, and tugs on it awkwardly.

Bucky sways a bit, and Steve grabs hold of both arms to keep him upright. They’re close enough to kiss, and every fiber of Steve’s body wants to. He squashes that thought. “I thought you were dead.”

Bucky’s forehead wrinkles into a frown of confusion. “I thought you were smaller,” is what he finally says.

An explosion sounds outside, and Steve remembers that they’re still not in the clear. He has a rescue to complete.

“C’mon,” he says to Bucky.

“What happened to you?”

He doesn’t have time to begin to answer that, so he says, “I joined the Army,” and gets a huff of what might be laughter.

~*~

“How ‘bout you? Ready to follow Captain America into the jaws of death?” he asks, sliding onto the bar stool, and he can hear his own hesitation and doubt under the joking tone.

Bucky puts his glass down on the bar. “Hell, no.”

It’s like all the air’s been sucked out of the room. This is it, then. He got what he never knew he wanted, and in return, the only good thing he ever had is being taken away.

But Bucky’s not done talking. “I know someone from Brooklyn who was too dumb not to run away from a fight.” He looks up at Steve, the old warmth in his eyes. “I’m following him.”

Because it’s Bucky, and he can’t let himself be a sap for more than a couple seconds, he follows that up with, “But you’re keeping the outfit, right?”

~*~

Soldiers gossip more than chorus girls—it’s an open secret among the Cabinet War Rooms staff that Steve ’is really‘or ’used to be‘ a woman. The consensus is that it shouldn’t get out to the public or the army in general, that it would be bad for morale.

He gets called “missy” to his face exactly once. The guy who says it can’t know that Steve would’ve stood up to him even back when he was 5’ 4” and had breasts, but he does get to find out what it feels like to be Adolf Hitler in Captain America’s touring show.

“I apologize, sir,” says Steve as the nurse tends to the soldier’s broken nose. He stands stiffly at attention and stares at the wall just to the right of Col. Phillips’ face. “It won’t happen again.”

“At ease, Captain. I’m pretty sure it won’t need to.”

~*~

“Yes, that was quite the insult,” says Peggy when she hears about it. “Wouldn’t want to be thought a woman, now, would you?”

Two minutes later she unloads an entire magazine into a shield that Steve’s holding.

~*~

They don’t get much time to themselves, and certainly not in private, so it’s weeks after the rescue before he finally gets to be alone with Bucky.

The army has requisitioned a school for their barracks, and he’s sitting on the step, looking out over the schoolyard and idly holding a sketch pad that he hasn’t made a mark in for at least twenty minutes. It’s late, and most of the soldiers are asleep, except Steve’s on leave tomorrow and he doesn’t have anywhere to be, so he may as well be awake, indulging his insomnia.

The day after tomorrow, they’re deploying to France to hit the first of those bases Steve saw on the HYDRA map. He’s ready for some action, ready to pay HYDRA back for what they did to Bucky, to Dr. Erskine, and he knows he should be asleep but ever since the procedure he hasn’t needed it as much.

The moon is only a couple of days past full, the stars are out, and the blackout means they’re startlingly bright for the middle of the city.

A shadow falls across his page. He looks up, and Bucky’s silhouetted against the sky.

“This seat taken?” says Bucky. Steve can’t see his face, but Bucky’s uncertainty carries in his voice.

Steve shakes his head and Bucky lowers himself to the step beside him, a couple of inches between their thighs. Steve longs to reach out; he hasn’t touched Bucky since helping him off of that bed in the HYDRA lab, and he craves it with a physical ache. Bucky did the ‘manly slap on the shoulder’ thing once—they both got so awkward that he never did it again.

“So you and Agent Carter, huh?” says Bucky, his voice casual, but there’s a note of tension underneath.

“What?”

“C’mon, you can tell me.”

“There’s nothing to tell.”

“She’s crazy about you.”

“She shot at me!”

“Well, there you go then.” Bucky’s silent for a moment, and then: “You’re all she can look at, Steve. It’s like the rest of us don’t exist.”

“What, are you jealous?” He says it before he can stop himself.

At first, Bucky says nothing, and Steve thinks he’s gone and messed it all up. Then Bucky leans forward, his elbows on his knees, and turns his head to look Steve in the eye. “Maybe I am,” he says, and there’s a challenge in it.

Steve swallows, his mouth dry. He knew it was coming to this, to the day when he loses Bucky. That he’s losing him to Peggy is just salt in the wound. “I’m not gonna stand in your way.” He knows he sounds hoarse, but at least his voice didn’t crack.

Bucky frowns in confusion. “That’s not— I meant….” he says, with uncharacteristic uncertainty.

It’s Steve’s turn to be confused. He carefully closes his sketch pad and lays it on the step next to him.

“Buck?”

“I guess…I was just thinking….” Bucky takes a breath, and the rest comes out in a rush. “What if things didn’t have to change between us?”

“But things have changed. I’ve changed.”

Bucky’s face clouds. “Yeah. No. Right. Stupid idea.”

“What I mean is, I didn’t think you’d want me, not now…” Steve makes a gesture that encompasses his whole body. “Didn’t think you’d want people thinking you’re some kind of a fairy.”

Bucky looks away, makes a grunt that could be agreement. “But you’re not ‘people’. You’re you.”

Steve risks reaching out, touches his fingertips to Bucky’s bare left wrist below his rolled-up sleeve. A jolt runs through him, and Bucky draws a sharp breath, closing his eyes. Steve doesn’t pull his hand away, just lets the breathless moment stretch out.

Just when he’s starting to wonder if he pushed things too far, Bucky’s right hand moves toward his, mirroring the gentle touch, before trailing up Steve’s wrist, along the sensitive skin of his inner arm, up to his bicep.

“Geez, your arm,” says Bucky appreciatively, curling his hand around the arm to feel the muscle flex beneath it.

“Heh,” Steve laughs self-deprecatingly. “You should see the rest.”

The hand stops its exploration, frozen.

“Sorry!” blurts Steve. “Sorry. Too much. I—”

“No,” Bucky says. “I want to see. Guess I’m just surprised how much.” He looks at Steve, finally, and in the moonlight Steve sees his lips part, hears his breath rough in the crisp night air.

He leans in before he even knows he’s doing it, his lips almost brushing Bucky’s. “We shouldn’t do this here.”

“No,” Bucky agrees, before pressing up into Steve.

This is new, kissing Bucky this way. Being the one to lean down, to scoop Bucky up toward him, to rein in his strength for fear of hurting Bucky.

The kiss quickly turns urgent, Bucky’s hands sliding up his back, mapping out the new contours of muscle. He could get lost in this, in exploring all the ways things have changed—or not—but then he happens to open his eyes and see the dim schoolyard around them, and he pushes Bucky away, panting.

“Not here.”

“Right,” says Bucky, and moves in for another kiss.

Steve catches him by the shoulders before their lips touch, and holds him back with superior strength. “I’m serious.”

Bucky stops, and shakes his head as if to clear it. “Always keeping me in line,” he says ruefully.

“Not even Captain America has that power,” Steve says.

Bucky leans into him, his head on Steve’s shoulder. “Punk.”

Steve puts his arm around Bucky. “Jerk.”

There’s silence for several moments as they both try to get their racing heartbeats under control, before Bucky speaks again. “You were wrong about one thing, you know.”

“Mm?”

“You haven’t changed that much. You’ve always been my Steve.”

~*~

“See, what I think is this,” says Howard, placing his glass down with the exaggerated care of someone who’s drunk. He picks up the bottle for a refill. “Erskine developed the serum with the ideal soldier in mind, yeah? And the ideal soldier is—y’know.” He looks Steve up and down.

“A man,” says Steve, as neutrally as he can manage.

“Yes! That’s what I’m saying. What do you think?” He looks around the gathering: the Howling Commandos, plus Peggy, all crowded around a table in the local pub.

“I think you’re hogging the whiskey,” says Dum-Dum, reaching for the bottle in Howard’s hand.

“I think you’re shit-faced,” says Falsworth, trying to get there first.

“I think you’re very obviously not a biologist,” says Peggy, swiping it neatly from Howard’s grasp as he reels back to dodge the other two.

~*~

It’s been raining for ten days straight, and Steve can’t remember what being dry feels like.  
Everyone is short-tempered, even easygoing Gabe Jones.

"I fucking hate Poland," gripes Dum-Dum when they finally join up with base camp that night, scooping what looks like his body weight in mud out of his boots. He glances up at Steve, who is frowning at the thought of cold rations right out of the can again, but Dum-Dum must misinterpret that, because he rushes to correct himself. "'Scuse me. I mean, I really hate Poland."

Steve forces himself to answer mildly. "I'm in the army, Dum-Dum. I've heard people say 'fuck' before."

"Yeah, well, didn't want to cause offense."

Steve sighs, because he can't tell if it's his wholesome Captain America image that causes this sort of thing, or something else. And there's no way he's going to ask.

~*~

“So you and Agent Carter, then?” says Bucky, sitting on his cot and shining his boots.

Steve sighs. “I thought we’d been over this.”

“Never did establish what you think of her.”

“She’s—she’s something else all right,” admits Steve, his face heating.

“Didn’t figure you for a ladies’ man. Guess that serum really did a number on you.” Bucky winks.

“Well, uh…”

“What?”

“Actually…”

“You’re kidding!”

Steve smiles apologetically.

“Huh,” says Bucky. He thinks about it for a moment, then gives a philosophical shrug. “Guess that makes one more thing we have in common.”

~*~

Steve gets up, headed to the back of the field near the treeline to take a leak. They used to grow wheat here, or maybe barley, but now it’s a nightmare of gouges and pockmarks, even craters where mortars once landed.

He passes two guys on their way back toward camp, handing a flask back and forth between them, and Steve can smell the reek of cheap booze before they get to him.

One of them shoulders him on the way past, and he staggers, his feet sliding in the mud. He manages to keep his footing, and turns slowly to face the soldier, a guy who once asked Steve if he was “on the rag” when he got pissed off.

“You got a problem, McCulloch?”

“What’re you gonna do about it, Miss America?”

Steve runs his tongue over his chipped left canine, clenches his fists at his sides. He breathes evenly, deliberately. “We’re all on the same side here.” He’s reminding himself as much as the other two guys.

McCulloch shares a sneer with his sidekick. “Yeah, it’s like I thought.”

“Too much of a sissy.”

“You want to let this go,” says Steve.

“Why? You gonna man up?”

“Go back to the chorus line,” says the sidekick. “We was doing all right before you came prancing out here in your tights.”

A switch flips in Steve’s head, a lightbulb comes on, one of those mechanical metaphors Howard likes. And suddenly he isn’t mad any more. These two are pathetic, falling down drunk in a muddy field in Czechosolovakia. They probably haven’t seen a warm bed in months, and now they’re support for a squad that’s going into the most dangerous places in Europe. He wonders if they even volunteered for the service.

He’s got bigger bullies to fight, now; tomorrow’s the assault on HYDRA’s Czech base. He turns away, heading toward the woods again.

“Wassamatta? You scared you’ll break a nail?” McCulloch shouts behind him, and then Steve hears a sloppy splash as the man slips and falls in the mud.

He doesn’t turn back, shakes his head and rolls his eyes as he walks away.

~*~

Three weeks later, Bucky falls to his death. That night, after the attack is over, the adrenaline faded, Zola captured, he sees it over and over in his nightmares.

A part of him is missing, like someone wrenched off his arm and now he can only feel the phantom pain where it used to be.

~*~

Peggy finds him drinking alone, in the bombed-out ruins of the old local pub.

“Dr. Erskine said that the serum wouldn’t just affect my muscles, it would affect my cells. Which means, um… I can’t get drunk. Did you know that?”

“He thought it could be one of the side-effects.”

She sits down next to him, and he can’t bring himself to meet her eyes, to see the empathy in them.

“Howard was wrong about one thing,” she says.

Steve huffs a laugh. “Just one thing?”

“The serum amplifies everything inside, so good becomes great; bad becomes worse. That’s why Erskine chose you.”

“Because I’m the kind of man who’d let his… his closest friend fall to his death?”

“Because a strong person who has known power all their life may lose respect for that power, but a weak one knows the value of that strength, and knows compassion.” She reaches out and folds her hand over his where it lies on the table. “The procedure didn’t turn you into some abstract ideal of a perfect soldier, it made you more… Steve.”

He hears Bucky’s voice echo in his head: _You haven’t changed that much. You’ve always been my Steve._

“I know what he meant to you,” she continues, “but if you respect your friend you’ll allow him the dignity of his choices.”

Does she know? How can she? Bucky’s been the one constant in his life for as long as he can remember, and now he’s gone. But he lets her stay in the pub with him, matching him drink for drink.

~*~

As he dies, she finally promises to take him dancing.

**Author's Note:**

> Before Bucky goes to war, Steve and Bucky are a couple. Steve is assigned female and not entirely happy about it, but doesn't really know about the concept of being trans. He is rejected from the army on the basis of being "a woman," and is all but ready to pull an Eponine/Eowyn and dress up to go to war when Erskine recruits him. The procedure transforms his body into the canonical tall, muscular, masculine Captain America.
> 
> From there, it's an exploration of different people's reactions to his transformation: Steve is happy, except for the social weirdness; Peggy is attracted but angry that she lost her one "girlfriend" in the army (and also that Steve now gets male privilege); some soldiers are transphobic; some Howling Commandos are unnecessarily deferential; Bucky is cool, to Steve's surprise.
> 
> A note on pronouns: Steve thinks of himself very firmly as a woman before the procedure, even if he's not happy about it, so I've used she/her for him before, and he/him after. I've tried very hard to walk the line of conveying the point of view of someone who doesn't have a concept of transness, while being considerate of the ways that real, modern trans people see and speak about themselves.


End file.
